On Bad Tanks

     I was tanking some dungeons with my warrior today.  All in all, it was a good experience.  I won't claim to be the most amazing tank ever, nor the best geared, but I think I can hold my own in your average dungeon group. 

     However, one particular dungeon today put in a rather dour mood.  I got Heroic Throne of the Tides as my second run of the day.  Now, I'm not particularly fond of the dungeon itself.  I find it to be rather... disconnected in a way.  But I soldier on through.  I'm a warrior tank, that's my gig.  However, the first pull of the dungeon with the two melees and two healers went bad.  I mean BAD bad. As in, I'm tanking the pack, targetting one of the healers.  The other healer was CCed by my wife's ret paladin, but that was quickly broken by the rogue.  The warlock was busy dotting up a melee.  So we've got me and my wife on one healer, the rogue on the other, and the lock on a melee.
    Great start.
    Once we managed to get the group to understand the concept of assisting the tank and burning down the healers first, the pull still took five minutes.
    Yes, you read that right.  Five. Bloody. Minutes.  For a warrior tank, five minutes is enough time for the universe to be created and destroyed.
     Okay, it's okay.  I'm a patient guy.  I have the title to prove it. Perhaps that trash pack was a simple refresher for the group.  Surely now, we'll all be on the same mob and we can progress rather quickly, right?
     Riiiiiiight.
     We didn't make it to the first boss before we had more chaos.  During one hallway, we had me trying to tank one pack while picking up the other pack the rogue ran off to get.  Throw in the various slows and whatnot that keep happening in these pulls, and you've got bad tanking conditions.  Especially when the warlock hits a third group for no reason.  Mind you, I still would have been able to cope with this.  At least my healer's doing good, right?
     Nope.  The little packs of psychotic Murlocs (I'm certain that Hell is nothing but murlocs all over the place) that run through the hallway kept aggroing on to the healer.  Was it from healing aggro? Nope.  I checked recount.  They intentionally damaged the pack of murlocs before they could even get to me.
     Again, I can cope.  I am a stalwart tank, charged with the defense of my party.
    Until, that is, the healer starts berating me in party chat for being a complete noob at tanking.  "You have AoE abilities, moron, use them to get these mobs off me!" It's hard to use *any* abilities when, as a warrior tank, you are rage starved because you're trying to pluck mobs off of the other DPS that aren't doing their jobs right.  It's also difficult to maintain any sort of reliable threat when you *do* manage to get them off, because you're still having to try to grab the others.
     Furthermore, rather than running away from the tank, regardless of class, if you get mobs on you, make a beeline for the tank.  The tank will absolutely LOVE you.  He'll probably send you flowers on your birthday.
If you can't run towards the tank, at least sit still.  Use some aggro-reducing abilities.  In the case of the paladin healer in question, try a Divine Shield.  That tends to work famously for an aggro drop.
    Running away from the tank while berating him for not grabbing the mobs you collected... that's likely to net you a severed horse's head in your bed in the morning.

     I must reiterate:  I know I'm not the world's greatest tank.  I'm not perfect.  Yeah, sometimes I do make a mistake or three.  It happens.  But don't berate me if the cause of the problem lies elsewhere.  In fact, don't berate anyone.  If someone's doing really low DPS, check one thing:  is their low DPS causing any issues for the tank as far as threat?  Are they targetting some different and unrelated mob, or are they assisting the tank?  If they're assisting the tank, let it go.  DPS numbers are not quite so critical.  If the tank is having trouble holding threat on an ever-swelling pack of mobs, check to see if everyone's assisting.  Make sure nobody's doing things that make things difficult.

     I can recall only a handful of times that I dropped group for a reason other than "House is on fire, aliens stealing my dog, and the kid is flying again"  This run... This was the worst I've had in a very long time.  I just needed to get this off my chest.